


The only true thing

by irisdouglasiana



Series: The gods will always smile on brave women [4]
Category: Vikings (TV)
Genre: Character Study, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-14
Updated: 2020-11-14
Packaged: 2021-03-09 20:42:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,735
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27552514
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/irisdouglasiana/pseuds/irisdouglasiana
Summary: Her name is not Yidu, and she is not the emperor’s daughter.
Relationships: Ragnar Lothbrok/Yidu (Vikings)
Series: The gods will always smile on brave women [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1235693
Comments: 1
Kudos: 8





	The only true thing

**Author's Note:**

> cw: slavery, mentions of rape, dubious consent

Her name is not Yidu, and she is not a merchant’s daughter. She is not the emperor’s daughter. She is nobody who matters, at least not in a way that Ragnar, king of Kattegat, would comprehend. So she tells him lies and he tells her truths, and if he weren’t such a fool, if he weren’t so wrapped up in his own misery, then perhaps he would have seen that from the beginning. He looks at her with empty eyes and tells her how he vacillates between killing himself and killing everyone around him.

She says, “I have the same feelings.” It is the only true thing she ever tells him.

* * *

From the moment he returned to the land of the living, Ragnar has been watching her. She, in turn, has been watching his wife, who watches both of them closely. If Aslaug wished, she could yell at her, or starve her, or pull her hair, or have a man take a belt and beat her until she bleeds. She could have her strangled and dump her body in the sea and suffer no consequences, except for the inconvenience of needing to purchase a new slave. But the slave traders know where they can come to make their riches nowadays and their wares are cheap and plentiful: though perhaps next time, Aslaug should take care to choose an old or ugly slave who will not turn her husband’s head.

In the end, Aslaug does none of these things. She is too calculating and too cruel for that. She gives her over to Ragnar instead, and in its own way, it is the worst thing she could ever do to her.

* * *

Ragnar pushes her up against the wall and asks, “Did they rape you?”

_Did they,_ she thinks dully, staring at his bloodshot eyes. She is close enough to see every wrinkle on his weathered face, every wiry gray hair in his beard. She can smell the stink of his breath. _What difference does it make to you? How many women have you raped? How often have you stood by and watched? Did it make you feel good? Did it make you feel like a man?_

“They did not dare,” she tells him, and already the tale is forming in her head. No, not even these savages would touch a princess. They would understand her value and ransom her. Her father the emperor would pay any price to have her back. He would never allow his daughter to be sold into slavery, to die so far from home.

Ragnar grunts in disbelief, but he steps back. _Put your hands on me again_ , she silently dares him. _Put your hands on me and I will kill you._ Not with a dagger, not with an axe like these barbarians like to use. Nothing so crude. She wants to kill him slowly. She wants to watch him ruin himself. He hardly even needs her help to do that. In the years that come, she sees how he will ruin everybody around him, his wife and his little sons too. She will take great pleasure in that.

She has imagined other things too. Some nights, lying on the floor in the hallway just outside the queen’s room, she has thought about how easy it would be to take a pillow and smother the youngest child in his sleep, the one Aslaug loves so desperately. She knows it is an ugly idea, but then she looks around at all these masters and all these mistresses, who take people from their homes and beat them and rape them and kill them—well, were they not children once? Now see what they have become. Now see what they do. No reason to think this child will grow up to be any different, supposing he even lives that long anyway.

Ragnar tells her to follow him. She wants to spit in his face and refuse, just to see his shocked expression. But then what? He could simply grab her by the hair and drag her away and no one would stop him. He is a king and she is a slave, as he is all too happy to remind her.

She follows.

* * *

He fucks her, of course. She knew from the first time he set eyes on her how this was going to be: he wants her, and whatever he wants, he’ll have. When he is finished with her, her hair lies limp and coiled on the floor like a dead animal. He sprawls out naked on the floor beside it and falls from his stupor into a deep sleep. She tiptoes around him, curls up on the bed, and pulls the furs over her head. She can’t stop shivering.

He told her she was free to go, and yet she stays. Some might think it a sign of loyalty or gratitude, even love. But the cold of winter has already settled in deep, and she has no means to return home or even any idea in which direction home might be. And at least in here she has enough to eat and a roof over her head, like a donkey or a pig in the stables. Except a donkey or pig would never have to prepare medicine to keep their master from turning on them in his boredom, or have to hold him when he cries, as she does for Ragnar.

He cries in her arms and tells her all his secrets and everything he sees in his dreams. He wakes her in the middle of the night to mumble some remembrance or regret before dropping back to sleep and leaving her exhausted yet restless. He weeps for his first wife, who left him when he decided he wanted to take Aslaug as his new bride. He weeps for his little dead daughter and for his eldest son, who remains a stranger to him even now. He weeps for fellow warriors lost in battle. He weeps for Athelstan— _my dearest friend_ , he calls him. But before that he was his slave.

“He was a good slave,” Ragnar tells her one night after his tears have subsided. “Not like you.”

Even half-asleep, he feels the need to provoke her, to remind her of her inferiority to a dead man. He called her a useless slave, thought her just another stupid girl raised into a life of softness and comfort, and so she told him a story she thought he would like to hear. But the truth is that when she spilled the water, and when she took too long to chase the chickens into the coop for the evening, and when she mended a tear in Ragnar’s shirt just loose enough that the thread would soon unravel—none of these things were clumsy mistakes. They were tests. He failed every time.

She wonders—but does not ask— _do you think Athelstan thought of you as a friend too, or is that only what you want to believe?_ She wonders, _would Athelstan have called himself a good slave?_

He sits up with a groan and totters outside to piss: the great Ragnar Lothbrok, fearsome warrior, terror of the Saxons and conqueror of the Franks. _Pathetic,_ she thinks. Though not nearly as pathetic as herself, begging to be taken to Paris, dangling a combination of threats and promises to finally be useful. She has grown sick of this place, sick of these people, and most of all, sick of Ragnar in all his weakness and self-pity. If she can make it as far as Paris, then maybe, just maybe, she can make her way home from there. It is a mad thought, a stupid thought, but what else can she do? She will not spend another miserable winter in a cabin in Kattegat, to be snarled at by Ragnar and sometimes fucked by him. She can die in Paris, if she must. She will not die here.

Ragnar comes back inside and sits down heavily on the bed. “You will come with me to Paris,” he says. “I have decided.”

He falls silent. It takes her a moment to realize that he is waiting for her to thank him, and she has to stop herself from laughing.

She says nothing, and at last he gives up and stretches himself out on the bed beside her and stares at the ceiling. He says, “The first time I went to Paris, I died and was reborn. What do you think about that?”

She turns her head to look at him. After a moment, he looks at her. There is something in his eyes that she has not seen before. It looks almost like fear.

She says, “What makes you so sure you were reborn?”

* * *

The medicine in her bag is dwindling. It is the one thing she managed to carry with her all these months since she was enslaved, and by now Ragnar has taken nearly all of it. It has deadened his pain, to be sure. The others believe she has weakened him and made him into a worse man and a worse king, but she knows otherwise. What he is now is what he has been all along. Eventually they will see it, or not. It makes no difference to her.

She listens to Ragnar snap at his young boys, huddled together on the ship to Paris. She watches him berate his eldest son and alienate his friends and moan endlessly about his brother the traitor. From the very beginning, it is clear this journey will end in disaster. Their gods do not look upon this venture with favor and they all know it, even if they will not admit it. They must find someone to blame for their failures, and they don’t have to look far.

Bjorn Ironside comes to her while she is crouched down by the river, washing his father’s stained clothes. He crosses his arms and scowls. “I know what you are doing to my father,” he says.

She wipes her hands and stands up to face him. “I have been helping him. Your father is a sick man.”

“Oh, I agree that he is sick; anybody could see that,” Bjorn Ironside says with a sarcastic laugh. “But I think you have been poisoning him.”

“It is just medicine,” she explains. “I take it too. Do you think I would poison myself?”

“Perhaps you would. I don’t know you.”

She shakes her head. “When I met Ragnar, the poison was already inside him. It has been there for a long time.”

Bjorn Ironside does not argue; he knows better than anybody what his father is, after all. But he leans in close enough for her to feel his hot breath on her face. She forces herself to not take a step back.

“Be careful, woman,” he says softly. “You’ve been walking on thin ice. One wrong step and it will crack under your feet. Don’t drown.”

After he leaves, she crouches back down and slowly resumes her washing. She peers into the murky Frankish water and examines her broken reflection. The barbarians do not know that in the places where people have drowned, their ghosts linger beneath the surface and wait for their next victim. As a child, she had been terrified of the drowned ghosts, but she understands them better now. _Son of Ragnar, I may drown,_ she thinks— _and when I do, rest assured that I will pull the rest of you down with me._

* * *

When she was just a girl, she had been playing down by the river when her older brother had grabbed her without warning, shoved her face-first into the water, and held her down while she struggled. She opened her mouth to scream and the water rushed into her lungs and stifled her cries. Her vision started to fade around the edges, but in the darkness of the water she could just barely see the outline of a woman’s pale face framed by short black hair, her eyes devoid of all feelings but hunger, the corners of her wide mouth pulled back into a hideous grin.

After her brother finally relented, she curled up on the dirt and sobbed, chest heaving and snot pouring out of her nose while he laughed. He eventually forgot about it. She never did.

There are ghosts in the water, and they will pull you down and drown you just as they themselves were drowned. There are ghosts who come to you when you sleep and they sit on your chest and squeeze the air from your lungs. There are ghosts with tiny mouths who hunger endlessly, unable to feed. There are ghosts you meet on the road, and some of them look just like you and me. Some of them don’t even know they are ghosts.

Her name is not Yidu, and she is not the emperor’s daughter. But she is somebody’s daughter.

She is somebody.

* * *

_It is a clear and bright morning when Aslaug hears the sound of the men blowing their horns. She drops everything and runs down to the docks to see her sons return. She hugs them tight and weeps tears of joy the moment they step onto the dock, and only once she steps back and wipes her eyes does she see the grim expressions on every face. King Harald and his brother Halfdan; Floki and Lagertha and Bjorn. Her husband is not among them, and she knows she should be filled with sorrow, but instead all she feels is relief._

_Ragnar is not dead, Bjorn tells her. They were defeated outside of Paris, and after they retreated and stopped to make camp and tend to the wounded, he disappeared into the woods without saying a word to anyone. They searched for three days and could not find him._

_“We will wait for the king’s return,” Aslaug says, more for the benefit of her sons than anyone else. She will leave a place for him, but she knows he will not come back—or if he does, he will have become someone else. She will not recognize him anymore._

_But there is much to do in the meantime. She invites all the warriors into the great hall to eat and rest and hear their stories, and before she realizes it the sun has dropped below the horizon and it is time to put another log on the fire and go to sleep. She is just starting to take off her jewelry when Ubbe comes to her and ask if he and his brothers can sleep in her bed tonight. If Ragnar were here, he would scoff and say that their sons are almost men and should act like it, but Ragnar is not here. They can be boys for a little while longer. So they all crowd in on her bed, Ubbe to her right and Hvitserk squeezed between him and Sigurd at the very end, and she picks up Ivar and places him to her left and tucks him under the furs so he won’t be cold. The boys rustle around and giggle amongst themselves for a little while, and after a little while their breathing becomes slow and steady._

_She wakes in the middle of the night and hears Hvitserk crying quietly, and Ubbe whispering, “It’s okay, we are home, now we are safe.” She smiles and goes back to sleep. In the morning, when she opens her eyes again, the sun is shining and they are all still there, dozing peacefully at her side._

_Careful not to wake them, she slips out of bed to get dressed. A young slave from Frankia brushes her hair and braids it. Another slave from Hedeby holds out a pair of necklaces and she makes her choice. She can hear noises coming from the kitchen, where slaves from places she has never heard of have been up already for hours making a meal for her and her sons. They are baking bread from the grain that was grown by the slaves working in the fields outside Kattegat, people whose names she will never know, whose faces she will never see._

_Aslaug leaves her chamber to begin her day and does not think about the woman Ragnar took with him to Paris. She never thinks of her again, and why would she? She was only a slave._


End file.
